A clearly written account of a widespread social malady that is sure to gain further attention in coming years.
How interactive technologies facilitate newly debilitating addictions.
Alter (Marketing/NYU Stern School of Business; Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave, 2013) applies psychological insight and business acumen to his argument that compulsive usage of smartphones and social media is not peripheral but rather central to their engineering and lucrative, seductive qualities. “The environment and circumstance of the digital age are far more conducive to addiction than anything humans have experienced in our history,” he writes. Although he speaks to game designers and other innovators, he focuses on the tangled psychology behind “behavioral addiction” and nascent efforts to treat it—despite a lack of consensus on whether or how to do so. Alter first explores how behavioral addiction resembles substance abuse, although it is more widespread and thus often free of moral opprobrium. This amplifies its risk to professionals, who underestimate their time spent engrossed by a constantly expanding menu of technologies. Video games have ensnared a wide demographic, as well. Consider the immersive appeal of World of Warcraft, and even simplistic games like Farmville captivated the unsuspecting, due to having “a new [gaming] rhythm that fits into…people’s lives.” Similar patterns can be seen in the rise of “smartwatches” and ubiquitous email: “The same technology that [now] drives people to over-exercise also binds them to the workplace twenty-four hours a day.” The exhibitionistic nature of social-network apps enables a similarly insidious hidden hold on users, which Alter connects to Mark Zuckerberg’s insight that “people are endlessly driven to compare themselves to other people.” While such behavior might seem acceptable in adults, the author is alarmed by evidence that “screen time” is warping the mental and emotional development of younger generations. He bolsters such points with sociology and marketing studies, although more focus on the fast-changing technology industry itself would have firmed up his discussion.
A clearly written account of a widespread social malady that is sure to gain further attention in coming years.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59420-664-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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